Professor Baruch Fischer is with the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Technion since 1983, where he held the Max Knoll Chair in Electro-Optics and Electronics. Now he is a professor emeritus.
He served as the Dean of the faculty during 1999-2004, was the Head of the Micro-Electronics Research Center during 1993-2001, and the Head of the Opto-Electronics Research Center during 2008-2017. In his deanship period he conceived and founded the Moshe and Sara Zisapel Nano-Electronics Center and built the Viterbi Computech Center.
He graduated, received M.Sc. (“excellent”) and Ph.D. (with “highest distinction”, in 1980) from the Physics department at Bar-Ilan University.
Was a Weizmann Post-Doctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) during 1981-1983.
He stayed for various periods at Caltech, USC, Bell Labs, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Tufts University, MIT, Sapienza University of Rome, École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications E.N.S.T, Paris, and Bar-Ilan University.
He is a Fellow of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America), was a Topical Editor for Optics Letters for two terms, was on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Nonlinear Optical Physics and Materials, was a Director of the Board of MRV Communications, Inc. (Chatsworth, CA), and was a member of the Technion Board of Governors. He founded in 2000 the start-up company “All-Optical”.
His research: His main research areas in the last decades and nowadays are Photonics, Nonlinear-Optics, Fiber-Optics and Physics-based (Quantum and Many-Body Statistical-Mechanics) Photonics.
He firstly worked (in his master and Ph.D. time) on dipole and strain glasses (à la spin-glass) and magnetic and electric impurities in 2D metals.
Then, in his postdoc and at Technion, he moved to nonlinear-optics, where he firstly worked on photorefractive and phase conjugate optics (imitates “time reversal”). He, with colleagues and graduate students, formulated and solved the full basic photorefractive nonlinear four-wave mixing equations, invented the first passive (self-pumped) phase-conjugate mirrors, the double phase conjugation, photorefractive self-trapping and photorefractive spatial solitons. He demonstrated fixing information (images and gratings) in photorefractive crystals, the first experimental transverse modes locking phenomenon and synthetic dimensions that can be lower or higher than 3 (hyper-combs) in actively mode-locked lasers.
He also worked on fiber-optics and fiber-optic communications, pulse optics, experimental demonstration of “time-lens”, temporal differentiation of optical signals with a special fiber Bragg grating, temporal Talbot-effect-based operations, and localization effects in fibers and lasers.
More recently, he developed the approach of many-body photonics, showing a new view and use of statistical-mechanics based study in optics and lasers. It included phase-transitions and critical phenomena in lasers and light, new classical laser light condensation effects, and the first observation of thermalization and quantum-statistical-based Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) of photons in fibers.
Publication: He authored or co-authored about 300 journal and conference papers and holds nine patents in the field of photonics.
Graduate students and post docs: Among them: Shmuel Sternklar (now in Ariel University), Shimon Weiss (now in UCLA), Mordechai (Moti) Segev (now in Technion), Ofer Werner (now in Rafael), Moshe Horowitz (now in Technion), Ron Daisy (now V.P. R&D in Camero, Israel), Ariel Gordon (now in Amazon Robotics AI, USA), Amir Rosen (now CEO in Irani Ventures, Israel), Ron Naftali (now CTO in Applied Materials, Israel), Ofer Shapira (was in MIT), Boris Vodonos (now in Lumentum, USA), Rafi Weill (was in Rafael and Technion, now in the startup company LiteBC, Israel), Michael Katz (was in UCSD, now in a high-tech company in the USA), Omri Gat (now in the Hebrew University), and Gilead Oren (now in Soreq SNRC).
Family: He is married to Esther, the father of Oded, Renana Fischer-Weinberger and Miriam (Miri) Fischer-Horowitz, and has eight grandchildren.